Laurence Robertson: Rather than leaving the money in the bank, would it not be better to use it to finance an organisation called the Severn Area Rescue Association, whose application for just £5,000 for a new Land Rover to launch its lifeboats was turned down because it could not provide details of the social background of the people it rescued. I am sure that the Minister would not want its members to try to assess the wealth of the people they were dragging out of the river. Does he agree that a better way forward would be for the lottery people to review their criteria?

Richard Caborn: I will always go back to the Treasury and see whether we can get more money into good causes and particularly into sport, but I want to make it perfectly clear to the House that all our financial modelling, which we presented to the House and in the candidate file to the IOC, was modelled on the fact that that tax would be paid. That does not detract from the soundness of the financial case that we put. If we can get another £300 million from the Chancellor, I would be delighted, as always, to bring more money to sport. We have asked that question, and the answer has been no. We will continue to make representations—not just on that tax, but on many other issues.
	May I just put on the record that the Government have invested more in sport than any Government have done for many years? I am extremely proud of that, and nit-picking, such as that in which the hon. Gentleman is engaged, does not fit a Government who have put more into sport than any other Government.

Tony Baldry: It must be a fact that the Church Commissioners face an increasing problem with funding clergy pensions, so church building repairs will come after that. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if we are to maintain the fantastic architectural heritage of parish churches across the country, we need more than the DCMS just making a response or a statement? We need a clear commitment from the Chancellor of the Exchequer that there will be a fund to maintain the fabric of parish churches; otherwise, many of them will start to fall into serious disrepair?

Andy Reed: I am sure that my hon. Friend is aware of the increasing pressures on clergy. In my own benefice, for example, we have three churches, but no vicar. My hon. Friend has mentioned £317 million of land property. Can he guarantee Church members in struggling benefices, and in my benefice in particular, that the Church Commissioners are getting value for the land that they are maintaining and that they are ensuring that existing clergy are put into post in places where they are needed and that the pension pot, the maintenance of which is vital for the recruitment of clergy both now and in the future, is being adequately topped up?

Alan Duncan: I beg to move,
	That this House deplores the lack of openness and transparency of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Ministers at the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions in their plan to restructure Railtrack; questions the Government's propriety in the method by which they sought an Administration Order for Railtrack; condemns their attempted intimidation of the Rail Regulator; abhors their cavalier and dismissive contempt for Railtrack shareholders; criticises the conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's special adviser for usurping the proper role of Ministers; notes that the Government's approach to the entire project was dictated by the Chancellor; and considers this episode an example of disgraceful impropriety in the formation of policy and the execution of government decisions.
	Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think that the House will respect the fact that the right hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mr. Byers) has chosen to come to this debate, although that sits in stark contrast to the obvious absence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is mentioned in the motion.
	This debate is about one thing and one thing only—the conduct of new Labour in Government. It is about the way in which the decencies and proprieties of how we are governed have been bypassed, corrupted and polluted. It is about the erosion of independence in the civil service, the abuse of power by Ministers, the arrogance of unelected advisers, and the institutionalised contempt displayed by new Labour to the power and authority of Parliament.

Alan Duncan: That was a nice try, but again it is completely wrong. As the Secretary of State well knows, the judge was only looking at the specific allegation put to the court about the conduct of the right hon. Member for North Tyneside when he was Secretary of State, which may explain why the Government's own QC accepted as evidence everything offered by the rail regulator in court, which I believe I will prove is damning for the Government.
	It is clear that one thing that the Secretary of State and his predecessors ruled out was formal renationalisation. They believed it to be too expensive. They were not prepared to renationalise the company because they wanted it for free. It is as though they have got rid of their clause IV, but secretly replaced it with clause V. No more overt nationalisation of industry—replace it with the covert nationalisation of industry. No more budgets for nationalising a company—use clause V and simply pinch it.
	However, the right hon. Member for North Tyneside was merely the front man for that; the real puppet master was in the Treasury. Crucial to the Chancellor's involvement was the aggressive and insensitive figure of Shriti Vadera, dubbed by Martin Sixsmith "Gordon's representative on earth." It was she who code named the plot Operation Ariel. It was she who first asked, and I quote from an e-mail of 31 July:
	"Can we engineer the solution through insolvency?"
	That was not something that the judge had to study and to judge upon. It is only now clear what a central role the Chancellor played in the whole plot.
	The right hon. Member for North Tyneside told the High Court about a special list that had been nicknamed the 10 commandments—10 conditions that needed to be satisfied before the plan to crush Railtrack was hatched. Can we guess who the 10 commandments came from? Yes, they came from the Chancellor—and it gets better. I have obtained from the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport minutes of a very interesting meeting in September 2001, where further details of the plot were discussed behind Parliament's back. Let me quote a small part of the official record of the meeting. It states: "The Secretary of State"—to us, the right hon. Member for North Tyneside—
	"asked when the Chancellor would be in a position to be able to agree his questions had been answered satisfactorily. Shriti Vadera thought this should be possible next Wednesday."
	That shows that the Chancellor was in this up to his neck.
	Abundant evidence was produced in the court case showing that from the very beginning of 2001—six months before the right hon. Member for North Tyneside became Secretary of State—the Government planned to seize Railtrack's assets and use railway administration as the means to that end. The papers show that right up to the day before they went to court—7 October 2001—the Government were seriously worried about not having adequate evidence of Railtrack's insolvency. Again, I could give the House scores of examples in which it is abundantly clear that that was so, but I shall offer only a few.
	On 3 August, the right hon. Gentleman wrote a memo to the Prime Minister in which he deals with options for dealing with Railtrack. He talks of the not-for-profit trust, which became the company limited by guarantee option, which was soon after adopted, saying:
	"The option of a not-for-profit trust has attractions as a non-nationalisation alternative to a failed private sector solution."
	The House knows that to be lawful a Minister may use statutory powers, such as the power to apply for an administration order, only for the purpose for which they were conferred. The administration power of the Secretary of State was given to him by Parliament to enable him to react to the insolvency of a railway company. In the present case, the evidence is overwhelming that the right hon. Gentleman used— I would say misused—his powers to try to create that insolvency.

Alan Duncan: The Secretary of State mutters from a sedentary position, "Who will pay for that?" I remind him again that he has since paid far more than that in the arrangements that have ensued the improper takeover of Railtrack. This was a massive threat to the Government's plot to present Railtrack as insolvent.
	Again, the process of government was totally ignored by Ministers and unelected special advisers; leaked emails and memos show the true extent of the deceit and plots that were hidden from the House. We now know that in July 2001, the Chancellor's representative on Earth was writing to colleagues and asking:
	"Should we be approving Renewco at this point in time when it could enable Railtrack to avoid insolvency for a while and rob us of a cleaner insolvency trigger?"
	That is clear and damning evidence that the Chancellor's special adviser was seeking to block the deal. The right hon. Member for North Tyneside wrote in that crucial memo in September 2001 to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that with regard to the RenewCo rescue plan:
	"I therefore conclude that we should not proceed with it. This will hasten the onset of Railtrack's financial problems".
	So there we have it—the Secretary of State for Transport was seeking to
	"hasten the onset of Railtrack's financial problems".
	Again, he is damned by his own words.
	It gets worse, however. A central element of the Government's attempts to wreck the plan was to ensure that any RenewCo debt was classified as public sector debt. In that way, the Chancellor could refuse to agree the plan, claiming that it was unacceptable for its debts to appear on the public accounts. But what about the Office for National Statistics? It decides the classification of where the debt lies, and was therefore another obstacle for the Government. Another battering ram was needed to smash through and plough on with the plan to
	"engineer the solution through insolvency".
	The Chancellor's representative on Earth described the ONS in one of her e-mails as
	"the joker in the pack and a deal killer".
	The national statistician has confirmed, in a written reply to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, that
	"originally the ONS decided to classify 'RenewCo' as a private sector institution",
	but after receiving "new information" from the Treasury, it concluded by 5 October 2001 that the company
	"would be classified as public sector borrowing".
	We have now seen the evidence, as it has been released to the High Court, showing precisely what was going on behind the scenes at the Treasury. We now know that officials from the Treasury e-mailed the head of public sector accounts at the ONS encouraging him to re-examine his original classification of RenewCo. The Treasury official wrote:
	"A holding reply today would help. It is very urgent. Something along the lines that you want to reconsider the case in the light of this new information",
	to which he might have added, "Sir Humphrey".
	In the face of such damning evidence, how can the Chancellor possibly claim that his Department was not attempting to influence the classification? There is now no doubt: his order to "reconsider the case" was a deliberate strategy to wreck the rescue plan.
	As the evidence makes perfectly clear, it was not the ONS advising the Treasury but the Treasury ordering the ONS around. It is time that we saw all the communications on the issue between the Chancellor's Department and the ONS.

Andrew Turner: The right hon. Gentleman purports to quote what the judge found. Will he remind the House whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the right hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mr. Byers) was the defendant in this case?

Kenneth Clarke: We quite accept that the company was in a lamentable state, and that any Government had a duty to consider restructuring it to make the privatisation—the present Government always agreed with us on a privatised railway—work more successfully. The question at stake is what was the position and interests of the shareholders, particularly the small shareholders? Was the company totally insolvent? That could be decided only by the independent regulator, because he determined the revenues of the company and whether it was entitled to more financial support. It was when the Government threatened to legislate to stop him doing anything that the company was made insolvent by the Government. That is what damaged the interests of the grannies, the railwaymen and the shareholders, whose interests the Government overlooked.

Alistair Darling: I will give way in a minute.
	It is worth reminding the House that on 20 August the directors of Railtrack were proposing to set aside the regulatory regime for four years—so much for the much-vaunted independent economic regulation. They wanted unconditional funding from the taxpayer. They wanted to emerge after the four-year period with their shares worth between £3.50 and £5—and of course the Government would have to underwrite that value. In the meantime, they were going to carry on with a dividend of 20p per share. In other words: everything courtesy of the taxpayer.

Anne McIntosh: As the House will recall, I took evidence on this point—and, yes, as the right hon. Gentleman says, I held Railtrack shares that the time. Why did he threaten the rail regulator? Why did he not allow the rail regulator to use the powers that the House had vested in the rail regulator under the legislation? By not allowing the rail regulator to use those powers, what message does that send to regulators in other industries?

Damian Green: It has been instructive to listen to both the current and the former Secretaries of State for Transport, who have been anxious to tell us what they did, but very reluctant to deal with why they did it, which is central to the point made by my right hon. and hon. Friends in the motion. I want to concentrate for a few minutes—I am conscious that other colleagues wish to speak—on the second half of the motion, which criticises the conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's special adviser and then considers the impropriety in the formation of Government policy. That lies at the heart of the debate. As well as the hugely important issue of running an efficient railway, it is possibly even more important that we run a fair and decent Government, and the whole episode reveals that the current group of Ministers—especially the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his advisers—are not capable of doing so.
	I shall concentrate on the use and behaviour of special advisers. As a former special adviser, I want to challenge the implication that the way in which special advisers' now routinely behave, which damages the reputation of the whole civil service, is in any way comparable with how they used to behave under previous Governments.
	The events surrounding Railtrack illustrate that the Government no longer hold to one of their articles of faith. They have always believed that the public care only about what they do and not at all about how they do it. That theory was exploded by the Iraq war, when even some of those who supported the Government's policy were deeply disturbed by the Government's lack of candour about their reasons for taking action and, equally, by the slapdash way in which decisions are taken, which allows the lack of candour to flourish because it bypasses the proper systems of government.
	What is transparent from both the files and today's debate is that the Government wanted to renationalise Railtrack. That policy could have been properly debated in the House. Indeed, that happened in other venues. That is an entirely proper policy debate. What is not proper, and what the Chancellor's special adviser in particular seems to have driven, are the efforts to renationalise by stealth and on the cheap. In particular, as we have heard throughout the debate, the Chancellor's special adviser was the driving force behind the contempt shown to Railtrack shareholders.
	The audit trail is clear. On 26 July 2001, Ms Shriti Vadera wrote:
	"I was thinking we need a trigger to insolvency that we decisively pull."
	At the end of July she was asking in e-mails:
	"Can we engineer the solution through insolvency—finding the right balance between not having triggered it and therefore avoid compensation. . . . but enough to be seen to have acted decisively".
	She went on to state at the end of August that
	"we have enough things to spend money on in the sector without worrying about bailing out shareholders who added no value to the company",
	before her now notorious e-mail describing the shareholders as "grannies".
	What the e-mails illustrate is not just Ms Vadera's contempt for small shareholders—that is a matter between her and her political masters, especially, perhaps, those Treasury Ministers who purport to support an enterprise economy—but how much real power lies in the hands of special advisers who seem to have no regard for any proper process of government. Permanent officials would not write e-mails like that about a sensitive matter of public policy, because they have proper regard for the way in which advice to Ministers should be devised and presented. Under previous Governments, special advisers would not have written like that, either. It is not a matter of pedantry or trying to wrap up advice in Sir Humphrey-style obfuscation; it is a decent regard for propriety, without which even democratic government loses its legitimacy. Governments have huge power. That means that individual officials have huge power and should exercise it responsibly.
	Many people would say that it is wrong to talk about officials, because Ministers take responsibility for decisions. I wish that were still the case. Under the Government, Ministers too often duck and dive and try to evade responsibility. Just occasionally, the light shines on what is going on behind Whitehall's closed doors and we discover who is pulling the strings. The Government who brought us Jo Moore and still bring us Shriti Vadera have no right to hide behind constitutional or parliamentary proprieties. The people who tore up the old rule book cannot hide behind the old rules. In this case in particular, they cannot hide behind the old rules because Ms Vadera was clearly uninterested in maintaining the structure of the rail industry, which the Government had left in place to ensure that a proper balance was maintained.
	We have just had an interesting debate about the role of the rail regulator and Mr. Tom Winsor's interpretation of it. It was entirely in the Government's power in four years to instigate a discussion and introduce legislation. They chose not to do so. When it came to the point where they wanted to renationalise Railtrack on the cheap, they realised that he might be an obstacle, so they started threatening him. The history of that episode shows that instead of having a proper policy debate, they choose to do things behind closed doors.
	It is worth analysing who lies behind this manifestation of the increase in special advisers' powers and the misuse of that power. The plans for the destruction of Railtrack on the cheap were clearly hatched in the Treasury, and the spider at the centre of the web was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is a little ironic, but I feel sorry for the Prime Minister, who has had to suffer public rebuke following the Butler report for his informal style of sofa government. The Chancellor is in many ways more culpable of subverting the proper processes of government, because he is characteristically more thorough, more rigorous and more focused than the Prime Minister when he sets about subverting the processes of proper government.
	The Chancellor's special adviser in this case was assiduous in pulling together and forcing through the policy that led to the collapse of Railtrack. To return to my first point, such behaviour on the part of a special adviser was unthinkable under any previous Government of any party. Special advisers are in a privileged position and should recognise that that brings responsibilities. That has clearly not happened in this case. Even more importantly, senior Ministers who appoint and employ special advisers should make it clear to them that they are expected to meet the highest standards of propriety—the standards that all of us expect from permanent officials. It is plain that the Chancellor does not expect or encourage his special advisers to meet those high standards.
	All that is a most serious charge to lay at the Chancellor's door. He aspires to be Prime Minister. In that role he would be responsible for the conduct of all his Ministers. Why should Ministers or special advisers respect the rules when the Chancellor of the Exchequer holds the rules in contempt? The Government's conduct over Railtrack stinks, because those at the very top of the Government do not care about using their power in a proper, decent and fair way. For that they should be ashamed.

Grant Shapps: Indeed. I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman's intervention. Earlier, he told us that he thought shareholders got £2.50 or £2.60 when the company went into administration. I can tell him that the shares were at £2.80 when he effectively put Railtrack into administration, and the shareholders were compensated at just £2.50. I am happy to correct that assertion and to cover another point that I wanted to mention about the right hon. Gentleman's contribution.
	Make no mistake: this is not an argument about whether we think Railtrack was a good or a bad company. It is not even an argument about whether we think the directors of the company were running the company correctly. There is well-established company law to deal with all those matters. If the company was trading insolvently, just as if my company were trading insolvently, there are laws to deal with the directors in such instances. It is not good enough for the Government or the former Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions to say that because the company was inefficient, or even if the company was in some way acting incorrectly in a legal sense, the only choice was to force it into administration, yet that is exactly what happened. The critical point is that it happened without reference to the House.
	The same argument is used about the independent rail regulator and the idea that he could not have been approached differently. We have heard about the e-mails that were flying about. In one, the Government were concerned that the rail regulator might thwart them, and they considered the Office of the Rail Regulator a "total wild card". In the e-mails of September and October 2001, the Government said that if they could not silence the regulator, and if he stood up to them, the plan to keep the company solvent would be "up the creek". In other words, the right hon. Gentleman feared the rail regulator.
	Time is short and it is important that we allow for sufficient summing up on both sides. As we have seen from today's debate, the project code-named operation Ariel was anything but whiter than white.

Kenneth Clarke: It gives me great pleasure to make one of my occasional guest appearances at the Dispatch Box.
	I have followed the Railtrack case since the evidence in the court case first began to reveal to the public exactly how the whole process came about. One of my key interests in politics during this Government's period in office is the way in which standards in public life have been reduced and the way in which the Government have changed the decision-making process. In the past eight years, most of the proper process has been subverted by the way in which new Labour operates, of which the Railtrack case is a prime example—indeed, it is the best example that we have seen so far, because of all the evidence that has come out.
	When the evidence on the Railtrack case came out, it did not get the publicity that it might have received because it followed the tragic London underground bombings. Then we had to wait for the judge to pronounce on whether the then Secretary of State was motivated by personal malice towards the shareholders. Today, the Government are trying to evade responsibility by introducing general arguments about the privatisation of the railways and the competence of Railtrack's directors, whom I will not defend. They are avoiding not only the decision itself, but the very way in which the decision was taken and the processes by which the ultimate insolvency occurred and the situation we face today arose.
	This Government took over eight years ago, and they have changed the way in which the Government operate, to the detriment of good decision making and the proprieties of public life, such as openness to the public and accountability to this Parliament. They no longer follow any proper system of Cabinet government, collective responsibility or recorded open decision making. I have been through all the papers and, so far as I can see, no Cabinet paper was ever produced and most Ministers, including most members of the Cabinet, had no idea what was being planned. That is a classic example of informal decision making on the sofa of one Minister or another. The only people who had the first idea what was going on were the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Transport and his then colleagues and, crucially, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who played a key role throughout.
	Meetings were unminuted, and many departmental officials did not leave their fingerprints behind. Fortunately, not only were one or two minutes kept, but a series of extremely reckless and unsuitable e-mails went flying between Departments. The former Secretary of State has said that the Department willingly produced some of the information, when the whole ghastly tale began to be revealed.
	This Government do not follow any of the normal rules of parliamentary accountability. We have just heard the right hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mr. Byers) discuss his intention to legislate, to which I shall return in a moment. This House was never informed about any Government plan to legislate to take away the independent regulator's powers. Indeed, when the report of the court proceedings was recently released, it came as a revelation to all hon. Members and to most Ministers.
	In my opinion, the best example of the absence of parliamentary accountability is the lack of any appearance by the Chancellor of the Exchequer or even, so far as I have observed, any Treasury Minister. The Opposition motion is extremely critical of the Chancellor of Exchequer, because his special adviser orchestrated the policy and because he was mainly responsible for the way in which the Government planned to restructure Railtrack. I cannot remember a Minister who, having been personally chastised by a motion on the Order Paper, did not bother to stick his nose around the corner of the Chair, and it will be interesting to see whether his name appears in the Division list.
	In my opinion—I am sorry to give this news to anyone who has not heard it—the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be the next Prime Minister of this country. Under the present Prime Minister, standards of parliamentary accountability have declined to a quite unacceptable degree, but I fear that the next Prime Minister will make the present one look like a democratic saint. The next Prime Minister is a control freak who disdains any criticism on the Floor of the House of Commons and leaves his colleagues to look after such matters for him.
	One of the worst things that has been revealed by this case is the undermining of the independence of the civil service and the misuse of the role of special adviser—a subject on which I have previously made entire speeches. The Government always promise to introduce a civil service Bill to restore the independence of the civil service and to protect the civil service when it is made to do things of which it doubts the wisdom; unfortunately, the legislative programme never includes enough time in which to introduce it.
	The special advisers in this case acted in an extraordinary manner. I will not repeat all the allegations against the special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but she is obviously a formidable lady and she played a leading role. I pity the unfortunate officials in the then Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions who had to contend with Jo Moore, who is, by all accounts, a very difficult lady, and who ended the ministerial career of the right hon. Member for North Tyneside for the time being.
	The Chancellor's special adviser was also obviously regarded as extremely formidable. When she summoned meetings, all the officials attended, and when she gave guidance on the Treasury's view, it was followed. The right hon. Member for North Tyneside, who at least has the courtesy to smile, must remember the times when he wondered who was in charge of his Department. He had to take instructions from the people who came to see him from the Treasury.
	Many of my hon. Friends who are present in the House tonight were formerly special advisers to Conservative Governments. I can see five former special advisers, and two of them were special advisers in the Treasury in my time. All those hon. Members will confirm that they would have been sacked if they had behaved like that. If my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who was a special adviser in the Treasury, or my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), who was also a special adviser, had sent such e-mails to the Department for Transport and had addressed the Secretary of State and his officials in the same way as the current Chancellor's special adviser, they would have been sacked. However, I would have expected any half-decent Secretary of State for Transport to have thrown out the Chancellor's special adviser and sent her back to the Treasury. When the Chancellor wants to issue instructions, he should have the courtesy to call a meeting and issue them himself.
	What were those instructions, and what was the Government's motive? The right hon. Member for North Tyneside has attempted to evade the whole point of the debate. He relies heavily on the fact that the court found in his favour, but it did so because the shareholders had to climb the extraordinary mountain of seeking to demonstrate that he was acting out of a sense of personal malice against them, which they failed to do. The court expressly left open the politics of the matter, and I do not think that a court was the right place to determine the proper conduct of government, the parliamentary process and other things.
	I have no personal malice against the right hon. Member for North Tyneside, but he cannot escape either on the grounds of the court judgment or on the evidence he cited, where he was just being disingenuous. He says that he was motivated by a concern for the travelling public, but they are not mentioned—there is not even a passing reference—in the e-mails.—[Laughter.] Suddenly, he remembered Hatfield and Ladbroke Grove. There is nothing in the papers about punishment being imposed for the undoubted lapses in maintenance standards at Hatfield and Ladbroke Grove. He talked about how much he resented having the legislation, which was not his creation, that gave the regulator his role, and how it was really all the Conservatives' fault that that was there in the first place. He is a Blairite—a pro-privatiser. When the privatisation of the Royal Mail is proposed, if the Government can sort it out, he might even agree with me on that—I have no idea. During all his years in government he never showed the slightest interest in renationalising anything. For four years, his Government were in office and did nothing whatever to change the structure that they had, including the role of the independent regulator.
	Let us have none of this. The right hon. Gentleman and Ms Vadera were not driven by a sense of concern for the travelling public or by a sense of outrage at the evils of privatisation or the rail accidents that had occurred. They were interested in two things. The first, which we have not touched on today and is the subject for a much wider debate, is the Chancellor's overriding concern that the new body that was to be set up should be off balance sheet. That is why it failed and every other device failed. The thing that the Chancellor was most concerned about personally was that it should not appear on the books and that any future debt should be totally off balance sheet.—[Interruption.]

Stephen Ladyman: Finally, with the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), we have at the Dispatch Box one of the real authors of the Railtrack misfortune. The party that says that it wants to look forward has given us a perfect opportunity to examine its past and rolled out one of its crustiest dinosaurs for us to have a look at. The fact that the dinosaur could roar did not mean that that party was not finished.
	There was not a word of apology from the right hon. and learned Gentleman. We did not hear a word about his role in the creation of Railtrack.—[Interruption.] We did not hear a mutter of regret from any of the sad remnants of the Major Government who are sitting on the Front Bench today; I can see at least three of them. There was not a breath of apology, not a murmur of regret, so let me start by putting the record straight.—[Interruption.]

Stephen Ladyman: The disaster that was Railtrack had its origins in the botched privatisation of the railway system, for which the Government whom the right hon. and learned Gentleman served were totally responsible. It was a disaster born with a feckless, economically illiterate and weak Government who were determined to force railway privatisation on the nation, whatever the price. As the price mounted, did the right hon. and learned Gentleman, who after all became Chancellor of the Exchequer before the privatisation was complete, once count the price? When he became Chancellor and the sale was being forced through before the general election, did he put his foot down and block the bargain basement disposal of national assets? Not at all. On the reorganisation of Railtrack, he was silent. When railwaymen and engineers were being elbowed from the board and replaced with retailers and property men, he did not utter a word to stop it—not a murmur.
	In an intervention, the right hon. and learned Gentleman said that, when he was in office, things would not have been done as they were done by this Government. He said that the Conservatives would have convened a Cabinet Committee and exchanged ideas in memos. Did those memos and those Cabinet Committees stop the disaster that was Railtrack? Instead, that Government and that Chancellor pushed ahead. If anyone has lost money on Railtrack, if railway travellers wonder why rebuilding the railways has taken so long, and if taxpayers want to know why so much money went into the pockets of Railtrack for so little return, they need look no further than that Conservative Government and the right hon. and learned Gentleman. If they want to know what the Conservative party would have done in the same circumstances, they need look no further than the comments of Tory Front Benchers—[Interruption.]

Stephen Ladyman: Nor from Tory Front Benchers was there a word of regret. There was none of the humility that the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) suggested we should see from them. They have made it clear that, in the same circumstances, they would do what they did then, all leading to today's master-class in denial.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for North Tyneside (Mr. Byers) reminded us of the state of the railways at the time. He reminded us that the neglect of those railways led directly to Hatfield. Not only were Railtrack insolvent, but it was not even fulfilling its basic obligations to maintain the railway.
	The hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) alleged that we wanted to renationalise, but provided absolutely no evidence of that. He mentioned special advisers. The role of such advisers was dealt with in some detail in the judgment, but time and again, Conservative Members said that those advisers were not considered in the judgment. I do not think that they have read it. They were dealt with in detail and that judgment vindicated the Government every step of the way.
	On the matter of advisers, I quote directly from the judgment:
	"Until a policy decision is made, at which point the government can be expected to present a united front in support of that policy, there are likely to be very different and often conflicting arguments within the several ministries or departments likely to be affected by the decision . . . One can thus expect, before a policy issue becomes a decision of government, that Ministers will be found to be expressing very different views as the prospective policy is thrashed out. Still less, at that or any stage, will views expressed by Ministers' respective Special Advisers be the views of government rather than their commonly being their individual attempts to argue their corner in support of what they know to be or what they hope to be their Minister's inclinations or with a view to leading the Minister to the inclination which the Special Adviser prefers."
	It is clear that the judgment specifically dealt with the role of special advisers.
	The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) mentioned that he was a director of a small business and said that its shareholders would be horrified at the idea that Government could take away their shares. The Government did not take away the shares of those who invested in Railtrack. Those shareholders were paid between £2.50 and £2.60 for each of their shares.

Cheryl Gillan: Two thirds of sentenced male prisoners—about 50,000 men—have admitted to hazardous drinking, and 25,000 of them have a severe alcohol dependency. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is surprising that the Government are in dereliction of their duty, because not one prison has a ring-fenced programme for dealing with alcohol problems?

Greg Clark: Is my right hon. Friend aware that parish councils are not statutory consultees under the Licensing Act? Is not that a scandalous omission they can best reflect the impact on their communities of a proposed application?

Theresa May: Indeed. I fear that that represents yet another example of the Government's attitude towards parish councils—trying to sideline them at every opportunity.
	When I referred to the costs incurred by people taking their objections to the magistrates courts, I noticed the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (James Purnell) sitting with a smile on his face, apparently suggesting that I was wrong. I suggest that he talks to Labour councillors in Newcastle, where two councillors have been left with a £2,100 bill as a result of taking an appeal to the magistrates court. That is the kind of bill that people are facing.
	So much for this legislation giving local people more powers. In reality, there are few powers to hold pubs and clubs responsible for rowdy or drunken customers once they are outside the licensed premises, even if the nuisance was caused by the pub having served them the alcohol in the first place. Councils and police cannot use nuisance and noise from outside a licensed premises as grounds for a closure order against a particular venue. Pubs and clubs can only be penalised if they make excessive noise from inside a pub, so licensed premises cannot be held responsible for the antics of their drunken customers leaving in the early hours, ruining the lives of those living nearby in the process. Again, as Commander Chris Allison of the Association of Chief Police Officers has said:
	"We cannot just willy-nilly object because as soon as we object to a licence the licensee has a right to appeal and we have to provide evidence linking the premises with disorder. Often the disorder is a half-mile or more away from pubs".

Theresa May: If the powers are there to deal with irresponsible licence holders, I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that if he wants to do something about binge drinking, he votes with us tonight to ensure that this Government do not implement an Act that can only lead to more violence and disorder on our streets.

Don Foster: The hon. Gentleman is wrong: the Liberal Democrats voted against the legislation—full stop. That is clearly on the record. He should take into account what his Secretary of State said. She referred to a number of issues that she claimed had not been argued by either of the Opposition parties. She failed to point out, of course, that many of the issues came to light not in Committee, but in the regulations that resulted at a later stage. Many of those' regulations are creating many of the current problems. The hon. Gentleman should also be aware of the huge delay. The Government have only just finished consulting—despite the fact that the Act was passed in 2003—on what to say about temporary events notices, which have not yet been debated on the Floor of the House. The hon. Gentleman really needs to check his facts about what the Liberal Democrats and others did during the Bill's passage.
	I understand entirely where the Secretary of State is coming from. She and the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire have said that we have a serious problem with binge drinking, but the real problem is that it is getting significantly worse every year. The figures are clear. The British crime survey released last week shows a 12 per cent. increase in violent assaults, in which alcohol was a major contributing factor. There has been a 15 per cent. rise nationally in
	"violent offences committed in connection with licensed premises",
	which amounts to almost 1,000 a week. Last year, there were an estimated 116,000 violent incidents against national health service staff—318 a day. Incidentally, that is 20 times the number of arrests at a football match.
	Health problems are deeply concerning and getting worse. There has been an 18.4 per cent. increase in alcohol-related deaths over the past year. The overall cost of alcohol to the health service and others is about £20 billion a year, with one in 13 adults dependent on alcohol and nine children being admitted to hospitals in England every day due to alcohol-related problems. The Secretary of State is right; we have a very serious problem, and, sadly, it is getting worse.
	The real question for the House is whether the Licensing Act will help to solve that problem or make the situation worse. Much has already been said about the Government's motives for introducing the legislation. Their motives were clear. We saw them in that infamous text message:
	"Couldn't give a XXXX 4 for last orders? Vote Labour for extra time."
	Today, the Minister said that he regretted that, and the Secretary of State has said that it was silly. Nevertheless, it gave the public the clear impression that the Government were not interested in solving the problems of binge drinking, but were much more concerned with garnering the youth vote.
	The Secretary of State said the message was silly and the Minister said it was unacceptable, but the spin continues. On the departmental website, we can read the regular bulletin "Licensing Countdown". I have in front of me the October 2005 edition. What sort of spin are the Government putting on it? Is it all about getting rid of binge drinking? What does the headline say? It says:
	"Calling time on last orders."
	That is hardly an indication that the Government are cracking down on binge drinking. The bulletin continues:
	"During the summer the Government made an order confirming 24th November as the eagerly awaited 'second appointed day'."
	Apart from the Minister and the Secretary of State, I know of few people who are eagerly awaiting 24 November, with all the chaos that will then be created on our streets.

Don Foster: I do not know the details, but if the Government create legislation and, as we have already heard, give opportunities for the licensing trade to increase what it earns I am not surprised that people pursue such opportunities. I want clear Government legislation that gives people who want to drink responsibly the opportunity to do so without the rest of us having to deal with the problems of irresponsible drinking, of which there is, sadly, far too much in this country. Sadly, the problems are growing.

Don Foster: I want to make some progress.
	I want to point out why the Government are wrong in their belief that the Licensing Act will help to solve the problem. In fairness, the House needs to hear their reasons. I would have thought that the Government would have given us research evidence to show that increasing the availability of alcohol would in some way help to deal with the problem of binge drinking. The Government have not given us that evidence, but several respected bodies have done so. All Members have received an extremely useful briefing from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology—"Postnote", which, under the heading "Binge Drinking and Public Health", makes it clear that in countries with an existing binge drinking problem increasing the availability of alcohol leads to an increase in the amount of drinking.
	If the Secretary of State and the Minister do not want to take note of that research, far more is available. I have a pre-publication copy of the International Journal of Drug Policy, which states that
	"past experience suggests that the new licensing arrangements risk leading to a rise in heavy drinking, illicit drug use, violence, morbidity and traffic accidents. The lack of attention the UK Government has apparently devoted to the experience of other countries where on sale availability has been extended is remarkable."
	The Government simply have not done their homework or given us the evidence to show how the legislation will do what they say it will do—reduce the problems of binge drinking. Very few people believe the Government. Judges, health experts, the licensed industry, local authorities and the public simply do not believe that the reforms will help. Judges have described the legislation as "close to lunacy". Let me quote the submission by the Council of Her Majesty's Circuit Judges to the Government's consultation:
	"Those who routinely see the consequences of drink-fuelled violence in the offences of rape, grievous bodily harm and worse on a daily basis are in no doubt that an escalation of offences of this nature will inevitably be caused by the relaxation of liquor licensing, which the Government has now authorities."
	Health experts say exactly the same as judges. Professor Christopher Day, a liver specialist at Newcastle university, believes that the Government have deliberately downplayed the medical evidence. The Royal College of Physicians says that there is already an epidemic of binge drinking and that the Licensing Act 2003
	"flies in the face of common sense".
	As for licensed industry experts, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) quoted Mr. Dave Daley, the president of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, who described the reforms as "an absolute cock-up". The Publican says that three quarters of licensees think that extended licensing laws will not help binge drinking.
	The public, too, are desperately concerned by what is going on. The British crime survey released last week shows that the number of people worried about public drunkenness and rowdy behaviour was up from 20 to 23 per cent. A BBC poll showed earlier this year that 67 per cent. of people thought that the Licensing Act 2003 would increase trouble on our streets, with 62 per cent. saying that it would make Britain a worse place in which to live.

Don Foster: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. I need not comment.
	I turn to the important subject of police powers, which the Secretary of State mentioned. Does the Bill contain sufficient police powers, which would not take effect if the legislation did not go ahead? That is not the case. If it were, there would not be so many people in the police who are so deeply concerned about the Bill. The Secretary of State and the Minister have referred to the position of ACPO. Sir John Stevens, the former Metropolitan Commissioner, said:
	"The move towards 24-hour drinking needs to be slowed down. The fact that large groups of people will be coming out at 3 am or 4 am will mean we have to man the streets to ensure they behave."
	Alan Gordon, vice-chairman of the Police Federation, which represents the rank and file officers, who ought to know what it is like out on the streets, said that many were at
	"the end of their tether"
	at the prospect of the legislation. He went on:
	"Our stretched resources will be even more stretched, with more officers having to work late at night and therefore fewer available during the day.
	It is very, very wearying and stressful for police to be constantly working extended late shifts, or all night."
	The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Glen Smyth, said:
	"Most nights of the week our officers are overwhelmed by a sea of drunken, violent, vomiting yobs who when they're not fighting each other, are falling through shop windows . . . That's now. What's it going to be like when we have a licensing free for all?"
	The legislation has not attracted clear support, and the Secretary of State knows it.
	The Secretary of State has said that some additional powers will be helpful, but the Government have already introduced some of the powers in the 2003 Act, such as the powers in sections 155 and 199 that allow police officers to confiscate alcohol from young people. She has made great play of the police's ability to close pubs for 24 hours at very short notice, but she should check the existing legislation—the 1964 Act already gives the police those powers, which were further extended in 2001.
	The Secretary of State should consider the police's existing powers and examine whether they are being enforced. For example, she has referred to drunken people on the streets, who must buy their alcohol from somewhere. As the right hon. Member for Maidenhead knows, an existing law forbids landlords from selling alcohol to people who are drunk. That law was amended in 2001 to ensure that anybody who sells alcohol to somebody who is drunk is breaking the law. The House may be surprised to know that on average there are 11 prosecutions a year under that legislation. The Secretary of State may be taking a few additional powers, but most of those powers already exist, so we should make sure that the existing legislation is being used.
	All the evidence suggests that the 2003 Act will not resolve the problem of binge drinking, and I believe that it will make the problem worse. I do not accept that chaos will occur if we do not go ahead with the 2003 Act, because all the existing licences for pubs, clubs and off-licences will continue until February 2007. There will not be chaos if the 2003 Act is stopped, but there will be chaos if we go ahead with it. The public do not want it, and I hope that the whole House will support the motion. Let us end the nonsense that the Government are going to deal with binge drinking, which is something that the 2003 Act definitely fails to do.

Anne Main: No, I want to make some progress.
	I have seen the police operating at first hand, and I know that they are reluctant to arrest a shambling drunk if he is not causing too much trouble. The figure of 848 arrests is therefore the tip of the iceberg. As our inspector pointed out, our cells and accident and emergency units would be overflowing if everybody who was drunk was arrested or sent for treatment. Individual revellers are often noisy, but do not commit an arrestable offence. So nothing much can be done as they clatter down the streets, keeping the people of St. Albans awake.
	"Cumulative impact" is a vital factor in a city such as St. Albans, but the local council's licensing policy is far from robust, and "cumulative impact" is not accepted when applications are being considered. Each application has to be judged on its own merits. Many city centre residents have joined the Save Our Sleep campaign in an attempt to lobby the council. They are worried about the problems that the evening economy is bringing. They put up a spirited, well-informed argument at the meetings, and they are regularly supported by our local police, who—such is their concern—have taken it upon themselves to alert residents to applications by giving out leaflets to affected homes. But this is all time-consuming for the residents, the police and, most importantly, the council, which has had to put masses of extra resources into dealing with these issues.
	At present, we have six committees dealing with licensing. They have granted 400 licences, and still the deluge continues. Before the Act, the former Labour Member for St. Albans reckoned that only about 1 per cent. of licensees would apply for longer hours, but the figure is 40 per cent. Just as importantly, many of the premises offer music and entertainment. Some residents who have bought flats above small shops now find themselves above café bars that have turned themselves into late-night music venues.

Anne Main: No, I will not.
	With so many licensed premises in St. Albans, it will be almost impossible firmly to attribute blame, which is part of residents' problem. They are worried that if they challenge, they will have to pay their costs on appeal. Residents are also worried—the Government have not tackled this—that the future sale of their properties may be blighted if they keep being in dispute with local pubs and highlight the nuisance, so some are choosing to stay quiet. Some city centre properties are already blighted and some residents are moving out.
	So how is the council coping and interpreting the policy? I believe that it is a shambles in St. Alban's, with brewers being the winners. At a recent licensing meeting, the chair gave her view that the council was "here to compromise". Perhaps that is the mediation to which one Labour Member referred. In this case, compromise means that if one applies to open until 3 in the morning, then quickly changes it to 2 in the morning, the objections of residents to 3 in the morning are deemed not relevant. Local police officers turn up to support residents with anecdotal evidence of rowdy behaviour—as I said earlier, they do not arrest everybody—but those views are deemed hearsay if an arrest has not been made, and the council cannot take it into account. St. Albans has also adopted a policy of not defining a vicinity. In theory, that means that anyone can object, but the reality is that the Committee is left unsure as to how much weight to give to objections. Again, how will that stand up on appeal?
	Worst of all, there is no concept of cumulative impact—the onus is on residents to monitor the licensed premises and then petition for enforcement if they can "show nuisance". It is a topsy-turvy way of dealing with the issue, which has residents and police wringing their hands. Is that what the Secretary of State meant when she assured us that the Act would increase the influence and power that residents and their associations would have over licensing? Well, my residents feel impotent. It does not matter what they say or do—the licences are being passed.
	On a practical level, the chief licensing officer accepts that the police cannot patrol all these premises, but he has received an assurance from this Cabinet that he will have
	"whatever it takes in resources to police this, including all-night council officers on duty."
	The current noise nuisance hotline, which shuts at midnight, will now have to be extended until later. Can the Government honestly assure the council tax payers of St. Albans that all these extra resources will be covered by the fee? When the Secretary of State said that the fees will give local authorities the tools to do the job, did she envisage a 24-hour noise hotline, teams of additional council officers patrolling pubs, more enforcement officers, additional street cleansing and litter collection?
	We need to stop before it is too late. We need to tackle the vertical binge drinking culture. If we want our cities to remain homes to families, welcoming to visitors and centres of tourism, we need to stop the binge-drinking culture and this flawed Act. I ask the Secretary of State to resile from her stated position and delay the implementation of the Act. It is folly. The people in St. Albans do not understand why you are not listening to them. Just because it is not causing a problem in your particular constituency—

Nigel Evans: I am grateful for the opportunity to make a short contribution to this important debate.
	I should make a few declarations of interest. First, I am a member of the Campaign for Real Ale, was a judge at the great British beer festival this year, and opened the festival, which was superb. Secondly, I am a long-standing member of the all-party beer group and have been vice-chairman ever since it was formed. Thirdly, I own an off-licence in Swansea—[Laughter.] That is half my speech gone. And finally, I live next door to a pub in Pendleton in my constituency, which I frequent regularly.
	I am one of the few Members who has had a look at one of these application forms. My sister received it, because we have an off-licence, and she got frightened and sent it to me. I looked at it, got frightened, and sent it back to her. We then employed a solicitor. What other Members have said about the cost is true—it has cost us well over £1,000 in solicitor's fees and to get an architect in to measure the shop, as well as various other costs. That is a heavy cost for us to bear, but I can only imagine the burden on many small rural businesses that do not sell much alcohol. One small business in my constituency has already let its licence lapse because it cannot afford to renew it and does not sell enough alcohol. Other smaller businesses and village halls will be affected, and it has come as a heavy burden.
	We have been accused of scaremongering and opportunism. We have certainly not been scaremongering, and Esther McVeigh was not scaremongering in Wirral, West: she was absolutely right. What we have not been doing, unlike the Government, is pandering to people. I am thinking particularly of the message that the Government sent at the time of the general election, to the effect that if people voted for them they would be able to drink all day. I know that the Government regret that now, but the fact is that they did it. They were targeting younger people with mobile telephones.
	The Government say that they want a café society. We, too, want to see more small wine bars opening. We are worried about the larger, urban pubs, which will contain several hundred people on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. That is where the drink problems will arise.
	The Secretary of State herself admitted that there is a problem with binge drinking in this country. The front page of today's edition of The Sun spoke of an alcoholic aged 12. One lady is so petrified of her 16-year-old daughter getting smashed on her birthday that she has taken a photograph of her daughter to 30 pubs so that she will not be served. The Secretary of State tries to pretend that the new laws will protect all those young people and their parents, but many of the laws are already in place. Moreover, many of the laws that she mentioned could have been introduced in splendid isolation, separately from the Act.
	If there is currently a problem with binge drinking, is it not logical to expect that if many more pubs can stay open until 2 am, 3 am, 4 am and 5 am, the problem will become worse? That is what frightens us. We are not worried about the staggering of closing times, which will have many benefits for the police. Many businesses, however, will start closing at the same time—4 am. Once one of them starts staying open until 4 am, there will be huge pressure on all the others in the vicinity to do the same.
	The Government have gone so far down the road that they will have to proceed with their plans just to save face, irrespective of the effects on the United Kingdom. It was the same when cannabis was reclassified from a class B to a class C drug. After the Government had spent £1 million on telling people that, actually, cannabis was still illegal, they set up a committee to look into the mistake that they had made and the impact that the change in the law had had. I suspect that the same will happen in this case. Binge drinking will get worse.
	We saw the front page of The Observer yesterday. The head of all the licensed landlords in the country said that landlords were being offered incentives to keep people on their premises after 11 pm. They might be on the receiving end of as much as £20,000 in return for encouraging people to drink more—to drink shorts or doubles. To reach the targets that they have been set, landlords will have to persuade more people to stay longer and drink more alcohol. That will be a real problem, especially for those living nearby.
	We were told that councillors would be able to object to noise, but the fact is that they will not. Councillors have been told that they cannot object to licence extensions unless they live in the vicinity, because otherwise they are not interested parties. The code of conduct, however, states that councillors living in the vicinity cannot object because that would be prejudicial. They are caught: whatever happens, they cannot object to extensions, and that prevents them from doing the job that they were elected to do.
	I shall end my speech early, because I know that the Minister will want to respond to many of the points that have been made. We are not saying no to any change at all. The hon. Member for Wirral, West (Stephen Hesford) reminded the House that we changed the law to allow drinking in the afternoons, which I would describe as a sensible licensing extension. The Government's allowing drinking until as late as 5 o'clock in the morning is a sea change in comparison. We introduced that sensible change 20 years ago, but since then binge drinking has got much worse. More people are drinking more alcohol at a younger age, and this change to the law will make matters worse. The Government have made a mistake. It is still not too late to change it, but for goodness sake, do it now.

Malcolm Moss: If implementation of this Act were proceeding smoothly and it were being welcomed by the majority of our constituents and the electorate at large, I am pretty sure that we would not be having this debate. I strongly refute the Secretary of State's claim that we are being opportunistic and are guilty of flip-flop—inconsistency. This legislation's progress has been inadequate; it has been late and badly prepared throughout. As the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) pointed out, in Committee we had no regulations, no guidance, no fee structure and no clear idea of implementation. There have been delays at every stage of implementation, and as many Members have said this evening, the application process has been a million light years away from the promises made by various Ministers.
	When it became obvious that the Government were not addressing the binge drinking problem and ignoring representations from the police, the judiciary, local authorities and the village hall and sports club communities, we on the Opposition Benches opposed the legislation at every opportunity. The Minister in Committee raised the possibility of an amendment providing for a 20 per cent. limit on fees for sports clubs, but subsequent Ministers reneged on that. We opposed the Bill on Report and on Third Reading, and the Government's attempt to suggest otherwise is, at best, misleading, and, at worst, an outright calumny. In any event, since this Act was debated in the House in 2002 and 2003, the problem of binge drinking has escalated to the point where large swathes of society are now in despair at the Government's intention to press ahead with this Act and with the second appointed day.
	A September Populus poll for The Times showed that the public are overwhelmingly against Government plans to extend licensing hours. It found that three fifths—62 per cent.—opposed the changes. Only a third—34 per cent.—were in favour of them. Women were against the changes by 71 per cent. to 25 per cent.; men were against them by 52 per cent. to 34 per cent. Not surprisingly, the only group in favour were 18 to 24-year-olds. In direct opposition to ministerial assertions, the proposals are not popular. People see the extension of licensing hours as having a direct correlation with crime, antisocial behaviour, ill health and additional costs to the taxpayer.
	There are now 1 million violent crimes a year. Violent crime rose by 7 per cent. overall last year, on top of previous year-on-year increases. But the most important point is that nearly half of victims of violent crime thought that their attacker was under the influence of alcohol. The Home Office's report of June this year, entitled "Findings from the 2003 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey: alcohol-related crime and disorder", admitted that binge drinking is a major source of crime. It states:
	"Binge drinkers accounted for a disproportionate volume of crime. They accounted for only 16 per cent. of the adult sample but were responsible for 55 per cent. of all offences reported by adults in the past 12 months . . . It is young male binge drinkers who have the highest rates of offending. This would therefore suggest that any measures to reduce alcohol-related offending should consider tackling binge drinking, particularly within the young male population."
	More worryingly, the Government have fiddled and hidden evidence that shows the damaging effect of more late-night drinking. Papers uncovered by the BBC's "Panorama" programme show that, as originally drafted, the Government's alcohol harm reduction strategy, launched in March 2004, included evidence from other countries of the damaging effects of longer opening hours. The Downing street strategy unit, which consulted 17 experts in preparing the strategy, concluded that extending licensing hours could have a severe negative impact. It said:
	"Restrictions on availability reduce consumption and general levels of harm. Relaxing availability increases general harm whether through more outlets (Finland), denser outlets (California) or longer hours (Western Australia)".
	Such concerns were removed from the final version, which made no reference to opening hours. A source cited by The Sunday Times as being close to the strategy stated that civil servants
	"drafted what they thought was a pretty decent strategy only to see it get decimated as it got passed around government departments".
	The cost of alcohol-fuelled crime and disorder is already £12 billion—£5 billion more than the strategy unit predicted.
	The alcohol committee of the Royal College of Physicians stated:
	"Already, alcohol-related diseases are costing the NHS about £1.7 billion every year. Around 17 million working days are lost annually because of alcohol abuse, costing our economy £6.4 billion. 70 per cent. of all weekend night-time admissions to hospitals Accident and Emergency Departments are linked to alcohol. More than half of all violent crime is related to drink."
	The committee believes:
	"The places that will take advantage of changes in the law are not the local, neighbourhood pubs where responsible drinking already occurs and the staff know their customers. It will be the large, anonymous, urban establishments, with a young clientele, that will benefit most—but experience the most trouble, whether it is through an increase in street violence or in damage to health."
	There are few powers in the legislation to hold pubs and clubs responsible for rowdy or drunk customers once they are outside their licensed premises—even if the nuisance was ultimately caused by serving alcohol. Most local residents cannot object to controversial proposals for late-night licensing in their town centre—unless, of course, they live very close by. Yet antisocial behaviour, crime and nuisance are not limited to the immediate area around the licensed premises; they can occur miles away as drunken revellers return home. Moreover, councils and police cannot use nuisance and noise from outside a licensed premises as grounds for a closure order against a particular venue. Pubs and clubs can be penalised only if they make excessive noise from inside a pub. Hence, licensed premises cannot be held responsible for the antics of their drunken customers leaving in the early hours.
	The Secretary of State claimed earlier in the debate that the curfew, as she calls it, would be a thing of the past. However, as the hon. Member for Bath said, there is nothing in the Act to secure staggered closing times. Let me quote Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Cheshire police:
	"In the various applications coming through, we are seeing a general extension of an hour or two on to existing hours. And that means that some of the problems we see on a Friday and Saturday night are now going to spread into other nights of the week."
	The idea that we will be able to curtail antisocial behaviour by staggering the closure of these outlets is nonsense. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) said, publicans have looked at what their neighbours and competitors are doing and have put in for exactly the same extension of hours so that custom does not go elsewhere.
	We ask in the motion for a delay, particularly in respect of the second appointed day.

James Purnell: I shall return to that point later, but if the current hours regime had actually been designed to encourage binge drinking the situation would not be dissimilar to the one that exists. There is a loophole in the current law whereby people can drink in pubs after 11 o'clock, but only in pubs that put on dancing and music—the very ones about which we are most worried. There are 320 such pubs in the centre of Manchester alone, so the idea that people are not drinking after 11 o'clock at night is wrong, but they can do so only in the places that we would be most worried about if we were designing the law from scratch.
	That is why we should be giving the powers to people at local level, so that they can make decisions based on local circumstances. My colleagues, my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral, West (Stephen Hesford) and for Caerphilly (Mr. David) made excellent speeches showing how local authorities are using their discretion to adapt their policies to local circumstances. A decision about the Dog and Duck in Leeds, for example, should be made on the basis of circumstances in Leeds, not by me in Whitehall deciding on a blanket closing time for the whole country.

Question accordingly negatived.
	Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments): —
	The House divided: Ayes 289, Noes 216.

Affordable Housing (West Midlands)

David Kidney: My hon. Friend's statistics reinforce the urgency of the situation, to which I hope the Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Jim Fitzpatrick) will respond in his reply.
	The Government have plans for a stronger intermediate housing market to help people achieve home ownership at an affordable pace. A new "homebuy" scheme for council and housing association tenants has been planned. A first-time buyers initiative will help first-time buyers who cannot afford to own or part-own a home without extra help. Existing home ownership schemes such as the key worker living scheme and shared ownership are being strengthened. In addition, the Government are releasing more vacant public sector land for housing. Their funding for social housing has doubled, and they wish to improve not just supply but quality. Existing social housing, for example, is subject to the decent homes standard, which has raised more than 1 million homes to a decent standard. The Government are also concentrating on the need for warmer homes. In addition to work under the decent homes standard, projects such as warm front have provided insulation and improved heating in more than 1 million homes. Higher standards for building new homes so that they are sustainable are at the heart of the Government's strategy. The more public money that the Government pay to build homes the more they can insist that those homes are built to a given standard. From next April, a code for sustainable building will be introduced, and it is pleasing that the Government have announced that they expect homes paid for by public funds to meet that standard.
	By 2008, the Labour Government promise to build 30,000 new social homes, including new build by councils. Councils have stronger powers to bring empty properties back into use, and a range of legislation has been introduced to enable them to do so. For example, councils can impose a fuller council tax on empty properties instead of rewarding the owners for keeping them empty with cuts. Councils can secure information to track down the owners of empty properties so that they can hold discussions with them. The Housing Act 2004 includes a power for councils to exercise new empty property management orders so that empty properties can be brought into productive use for society's benefit.
	A week ago, during the national week of action of empty homes, I published a pamphlet calling for a new classification of empty properties as "redfield" sites. Such sites would be used to designate land containing vacant property that could be brought back into use as residential housing. Government guidance to planners would require them to apply the sequential test to the provision of housing sites. Redfield sites containing empty properties would be considered first for their suitability as sites for new homes. Brownfield sites would be considered next and then, as now, greenfield sites.
	The need for affordable housing can be met by building new homes; by converting existing houses and other buildings; and by bringing vacant homes and other vacant properties back into residential use. That national plan is applied locally by the west midlands regional housing strategy, a well-researched document prepared after extensive consultation with local authorities and other stakeholders. There are agreed priorities for the region, including urban and rural renaissance and something that the strategy calls "The Big Issue: Affordability". All those priorities have been developed within the context of mixed, balanced and inclusive communities.
	West midlands housing resources for the current financial year include a Government housing allocation of more than £180 million. As a result of the last spending review an estimated 2,000 social rented units will be delivered in the west midlands in 2007–08. There is a desperate need to help large numbers of residents trapped in overcrowded or unfit housing, as well as people who have no permanent housing at all. An eighth of England's homeless live in the west midlands, and about 120,000 households are registered on council housing lists. There are 116,000 unfit dwellings and 75,000 empty homes. Last year, 5,332 council homes were sold under the right to buy, including 200 in Stafford.
	Sadly, however, despite that background, the constituency of Stafford is not identified in our regional plan as an area of particular need requiring special help for meeting our needs for affordable housing. That dismays me, because I uncover in my casework a great deal of pressure across the board for help with affordable housing, be it from young couples looking for their first home, key public sector workers having trouble finding a home to buy, existing tenants of councils and housing associations wanting to move or to buy but finding themselves trapped where they are, or retired people on limited incomes who want to downsize but cannot find anywhere to suit their pocket. Increasingly, I am also having to advise people who have been knocked back by councils in homelessness applications to challenge them in the courts.
	In addition to all this, the house price to average salary ratio in my constituency is as high as 8:1. Furthermore, 80 per cent. of the South Staffordshire district—part of which is in my constituency—is unsuitable for the building of new homes because of green-belt and other open countryside policies. That means that housing is concentrated in the existing villages, where restrictive planning policies result in very high prices that local people cannot afford.
	The Shelter campaign's request for 20,000 additional social rented houses a year in England would translate into an extra 1,330 units annually in the west midlands during the three years from 2008. Shelter estimates that that could help to lift more than 11,500 children out of bad housing. Will the Minister acknowledge the urgency of the need for more affordable housing across the whole of the west midlands region? Will he also spare a thought for the specific needs of my constituency?
	I would ask the Minister to adopt policies such as ensuring that Labour's manifesto promises relating to the Homebuy programme, the first-time buyers' initiative, the key worker living scheme, and shared ownership will apply in the west midlands. The key worker living scheme does not apply outside the south-east. Will the Minister ensure that there are stronger planning powers under new planning policy statement 3, when it appears, which would enable councils to secure affordable housing as part of all new developments? Will he also ensure that there is greater certainty for developers, registered social landlords and private property investors, so that they will invest in our region? Will he look at Shelter's Building Hope agenda, so that there can be more homes? Will he introduce policies for more funding, for stronger section 106 agreements, for modernising the private rented sector and for further reform of the right to buy?
	I hope that we will take forward the Deputy Prime Minister's initiative for affordable homes built by modern methods of construction at affordable prices. I should like to mention that there is a developer in my Stafford constituency who would like to see affordable homes being built as part of his wider regeneration projects, but who argues for a tax credit arrangement for a public subsidy to him, instead of the complex system of applying for grants. He also has an idea for establishing an institute for modern building technology to train the labour force required for putting into practice modern methods of construction. I hope that all that will be welcomed by the Minister.
	Rural housing needs particular attention. In the last Parliament, Labour set targets for the creation of affordable homes in rural areas, and met them. In our manifesto, we promised to explore how to ensure that a proportion of all new housing development could be made available and affordable to local residents and their families in rural areas. In fairness, the Government have now established what they promised in their rural manifesto: an affordable rural housing commission, chaired by Elinor Goodman, which is due to report early next year.
	Let us remember that rural Britain generates 30 per cent. of the nation's jobs and 25 per cent. of its gross domestic product, all from 23 per cent. of the nation's population. However, the lack of affordable housing in rural areas is a key challenge. Many of my constituents have raised this issue with me many times. Sometimes, the houses are just not there to enable children to live in the places where they grew up. In other cases, the homes that are there are simply too expensive for them to afford, so they are unable to live locally.
	The west midlands regional housing strategy goes so far as to suggest that, in rural areas, consideration should be given to allocating 100 per cent. affordable housing sites. That is an impressive commitment to what could be done through planning law to ensure that we can have affordable housing in rural areas. We also need special measures, including more stretching targets for new affordable homes in rural areas—recognising the higher costs of rural developments, both in land prices and unit building costs—and ring-fencing the investment needed to meet the higher targets. We also need innovative co-operative, mutual and other models under which the affordability can be locked in for all time. Similarly, we need to make more attractive the use of exceptions sites for new affordable homes.
	On right to buy, I would also argue that councils in rural areas, and housing associations in rural areas with a population larger than 3,000, ought to have more protection from losing their stock to right to buy. Let me give the example of one village in my constituency, Wheaton Aston, where the South Staffordshire Housing Association has a stock of 58 units of affordable homes but currently has a waiting list of 74 and a turnover in 2004–05 of just three. For the full picture for my constituency, one would have to multiply those figures by a factor of about 30. To get the full picture in the west midlands, where there are 59 constituencies, one would have to multiply again. It is therefore a huge problem.
	That is why, across the west midlands, there are families, single people and vulnerable individuals who have no secure homes of their own. Some would like to buy a home but cannot do so without help. Others would like to make progress towards home ownership, but there is no supply of intermediate housing for them. Others still want to rent, because they prefer this tenure long-term, or because renting suits their immediate needs. On the other hand, there are developers willing to provide, investors willing to fund, builders willing to construct, and registered social landlords and councils willing to manage. I am asking the Minister to join up the supply side and help meet the demand.
	We should not rest while there is so much unmet need for affordable housing. Opportunity, ambition and lifetime achievement will be hindered until those in need can have access more consistently, in greater numbers and with wider choice to a range of affordable housing in all parts of the west midlands. I therefore ask the Minister to help the west midlands to help itself to meet the pressing need for affordable housing.

CORRECTION

18 October 2005: In col. 794, in the Ayes, insert "Taylor, David".